"We deserve a president of the United States who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity and the rhetoric of a campaign," Kerry said. "We deserve a president who makes America safer."

Out of all the far out statements of the day (and believe me, with Gore's speech, there were A LOT), this had to be my favorite. Siezing the opportunity to bash Bush, Kerry admonished the President after it was revealed yesterday that Al Qaeda was planning an attack in the United States this summer.

Aside from the obvious - of course they're planning an attack, they're not just going to sit idly by with so many targets (G8 summit, Dem & Rep national conventions, election, etc.) - the fact that Kerry has the gall to attack the President on our safety at home is just apalling. How many attacks have there been on U.S. soil since 9/11 and the war on terror began? Zero. Now, when you think that we've gone over two and a half years without a terror attack in the United States, the #1 target of Al Qaeda, it just is absurd to think that John F. Kerry would attack the President on the basis of an unsafe America.

URL: Candidates confront threat of terror attack

A while ago, before I switched to SpamBayes, I had used Firetrust's Mailwasher. It effectively stopeed spam based on filters and even bounced e-mails back so the spammers thought that my address didn't exist. However, the bounced mails became less effective as spammers spoofed e-mail addresses and the filters were subverted by the spammer's tactics. So I have tried everything else and settled on SpamBayes. However, SpamBayes has been putting a lot of stress on my hard drive as it has to analyze thousands of e-mails a day to see if they're spam and then process them in Outlook. I was becoming worried about my drive, so I decided to give Mailwasher Pro 4.0 another go.

The software has improved greatly since the last time I used it. The filters are much more robust and the blacklisting feature works well. But, aside from those basic options, you can subscribe to Firetrust's real-time spam database and they have been extremely accurate (I watched it for a day or so and then just let it automatically delete). Since every e-mail is checked by a human before being classified as spam (and only after two users have reported it), there is little chance of a newsletter or other legitimate spam being blocked. All this for just $7/year - a price well worth paying (I registered Mailwasher way back when and they still support updates).

On top of the real-time database, I also have Mailwasher set up to query Spamcop to determine if the mail is being sent from a blacklisted domain, and if it is, it is also automatically deleted on the server level (just like Firetrust's database queries), so the e-mails are never on my computer. They are never analyzed by SpamBayes, they are never a problem. So now I've got the Firetrust Real-Time Spam Database, the Spamcop database and my own filters which I am tweaking (only been using this new version a couple of days), and I'm able to get down to a manageable level of mails to sort through (and report to Firetrust) manually.

The reason I went back to Mailwasher from SpamBayes, like I said above, is because of all the e-mails I was getting on a daily basis. The last time I reported my stats was on March 22nd, and every 2 days I received 4,500 e-mails. At the time, that was manageable for SpamBayes and didn't put too much strain on my hard drive. But now, checking my stats in Mailwasher Pro, today I received 14,061 e-mails. Of those, 37 were from people on my "friends" list (I added any e-mail that I want to receive to my friends list). So basically, out of about 14,000 e-mails, about 40 were good. Thank god for the internet. Maybe it really is time to switch over to my GMail account permanently.

URL: FIRETRUST : Products : MailWasher� Pro Overview

I still can't quite get over the fact that Michael Moore's new "documentary" (most likely more a fictional commentary - but hey, if the left wants to blindy believe everything in it, let's go with documentary), Farenheit 9/11 has won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes film festival. I'm not sure what upsets me more - the fact that the Palm d'Or is supposed to award artistic merit rather than political agendas or the fact that Moore's "documentaries" are not even documentaries under the definition of the term. I guess it shouldn't be a huge surprise that Moore won with all the anti-Bush thinking in Hollywood right now, nor did it hurt Moore that Cannes is held in France, one of the few countries that still refuses to join the war on terror (I guess all they need is a wake up call).

But really, if you put my personal hatred of this liar aside, I really don't understand how the film could have won the top prize. Maybe if Cannes were a film festival for anti-Bush propaganda or if it were a Democratic National Convention - but it's not. Their "Article One" seems to contradict everything that happened when the award went to Moore:

The spirit of the Festival de Cannes is one of friendship and universal cooperation. Its aim is to reveal and focus attention on works of quality in order to contribute to the progress of the motion picture arts and to encourage the development of the film industry throughout the world.

I fail to see how giving an award to a film that at it's core is meant to do only one thing - defame a sitting president - encourages "friendship and universal cooperation." I fail to see how by giving the award to Moore we are focusing on "works of quality" as I have read reviews that blast the film as nothing but propaganda and hatred. And finally, how can Farenheit 9/11 "encourage development of the film industry?" At best, it encourages people to make one-sided commentaries that will appeal to people who only share the same ideals as you.

There was a time when the Palm d'Or meant something. After this year, it's a worthless award in my mind.

URL: Cannes Film Festival